Friday Links – 9/20/13

Posted: September 20, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Links | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Work from Raimon Guirado: Fausto

Some links to get you ready for the weekend:

  • An interesting interview from Bad At Sports about a new art-based social media site. It seems to me to be pretty similar to a tumblr or Pinterest, but the networking with other art professionals could be neat.
  • The NY Times covered MoMA’s New Photography Exhibition, featuring work by Broomberg & Chanarin, Annette Kelm, and Brendan Fowler.
  • Also on Broomberg & Chanarin (who are absolutely worth a look), the duo just released their new book project, Frozen Chicken Train Wreck.
  • A thought-provoking article from Vice about a new Danish magazine, Illegal!,  which hard drug users can buy for $1.80 and sell to the public for around $5.00. The mission statement is based on giving addicts a way to earn money (yes, with the understanding that it’s probably going back to drugs) without robbing people, shoplifting, or selling their bodies for sex. Vice also asked people on the street whether they thought the model was a worthy one, with some conflicting answers.
  • It’s the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination in November, and the always excellent Chris Jones put together this chronology piece for Esquire covering the time from the killing to the moment the new President Johnson arrived in Washington. Great stuff.
  • A wonderful feature on the chaotic capital of the Congo, Kinshasa, and the underground art world that developed out of necessity.
  • Over on It’s Nice That, a spotlight on young Spanish designer Raimon Guirado. He’s newly graduated from university and putting together some killer typography and zine projects. Certainly worth checking out.
  • More It’s Nice That: photographer Daniel Ginns takes shots of painted-over graffiti to create an almost Rothko-esque image.
  • Kemistry Gallery in London just kicked off their exhibition of work by graphic design gods Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast. You’ve probably seen posters or advertisements from these two, and if you’re unfamiliar with them (or their famous firm, Push Pin Studio) then you need to dive in.

At Water, Los Angeles: an interview with Nathanael Turner

Posted: September 19, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Art, Interview, Reviewing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nathanael Turner, from At Water, Los Angeles

I have a new post up on Paper Journal this morning, a really exciting interview with Los Angeles-based photographer Nathanael Turner. I spoke to him about his bi-costal influences, photo book publishing, and his method of capturing intimate yet abstract portraits of people in everyday situations.

From At Water, Los Angeles

The piece coincides with the opening of the NY Art Book Fair 2013 today at MoMA’s PS1 over in Queens. This is the eighth-annual Art Book Fair, the world’s premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. Turner’s newest work, At Water, Los Angeles, is getting exhibited at this year’s fair with the rest of Fourteen-Nineteen’s books, zines, and periodicals. Here’s an excerpt of our interview:

What drew you to the idea of publishing your work in book form?

For this project, it all stemmed from Fourteen-Nineteen’s interest in collaborating on a book with me. I proposed a few ideas and one turned into At Water, Los Angeles. In general though, books have always made a lot of sense to me. Most of us have been experiencing books since before we could speak. My own work, most often, takes place within a narrative, so it lends itself to that structure. The book form also forces the viewer to engage in the work in a fairly systematic way. The images in At Water, for example, were made with very little structure, so the book creates an organized, linear composition of the images.

Do you think there’s importance to the fact that your new book focuses on LA and the west coast, but is being exhibited at the New York Art Book Fair and is printed by a London-based publisher? What do you think of the globalisation of contemporary photography as it applies to your own work and to the field as a whole?

It’s exciting. I’ve been able to work with amazingly talented people from several different cities around the world, and I’m not sure those opportunities would have been possible a short time ago.

You can read more about the NY Art Book Fair at their website. If you’re over in New York this weekend, be sure to check it out and grab some books!

Your Own House: Maurice Van Es

Posted: September 11, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Art, Reviewing | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

From the series “The Past is a Strange Place” via Maurice Van Es

Way, waaaaaay late, but check out my feature on Dutch photographer Maurice Van Es over at Paper Journal. I looked at and discuss a few of Van Es’s projects, including To me you are a work of art, The past is a strange place, and Textures of childhood. He’s got some really great images, and straddles the lines between dreamy and crisp, and claustrophobic and familiar in a very interesting way. An excerpt:

In To me you are a work of art, he trains his camera to Duchampian ‘sculptures’ created by his mother – a pile of folded towels, two remote controls stacked upon one another – making his parents’ home a sort of museum to the art of domesticity. Van Es’s photographs are remnants of everyday existence, modern ruins and ziggurats and pyramids of domesticity unwittingly cast in cloth or wood. They are accidental monuments to a crisp moment, a memory preserved in pixels. Yet they are terribly familiar. According to Van Es, ‘You can find these traces in your own house too.’

I’m really excited to watch Van Es and see where his career grows from here – the dude’s like 24 years old and churning out some fantastic stuff.

via Maurice Van Es

I’ve got a few more projects in the works for Paper Journal that are coming soon, including a piece on one of the exhibitors at this month’s New York Art Book Fair, so keep an eye out for those.